What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.